farm workers

While some regions around the world battle with increasing obesity, much of Africa continues to experience severe food shortages, as millions of African people suffer daily from hunger. The reality of food shortages in Africa is well-known. So well known, in fact, that the average middle-class fast food eating person is generally unable to feel anything but blasé about it. There are many others, however, who do try to help, and countless organisations and programmes working to provide food for the hungry.

The South African government has set itself the target of redistributing 30% of South Africa’s commercial farming land to black farmers by 2014. So far it has only achieved just over 4%.

The easiest way to quickly reach the 30% target would be for government to find large amounts of cheap, unproductive peripheral land and allocate this to a few people. This land could be in the middle of the arid Karoo or the Northern Cape.

The Nkuzi Development Association has slammed the attitude of farm owners towards minimum wages for farm workers in Limpopo.

A spokesperson for the organisation, Shirhami Shirinda says it is unacceptable that farmers will have to hide behind minimum wages when some of them are not even paying as required by law.

Women from South Africa's three Cape provinces have marched to parliament in Cape Town to denounce the country's "slow and unbalanced" land redistribution programme.

The protesters say that if they are not given greater access to land, they will not vote in the upcoming general elections on 22 April 2009. They waved placards criticising Minister of Land Affairs Lulu Xingwana, for failing them.

The Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs has taken over a farm under a controversial new policy of taking back unproductive farms allocated to blacks as part of a land redistribution programme.

The move comes shortly after minister Lulu Xingwana, announced the "use it or lose it" initiative for farms which black beneficiaries have left idle.

An ostrich farm in Hammanskraal was repossessed following demeaning reports regarding the poor conditions of the ostriches.